Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

Tetris. Differently shaped chunks consisting of four blocks raining
from the sky, and the only way to clear them is by arranging them
into a series of complete, horizontal lines. That's just genius,
isn't it?

And it works so well! The speed levels gradually ramp up, there are
pre-built scenarios to try and work your way out of, there's that
ever so catchy theme tune which preys on your mind until it's all
you can do not to hum it, and there are even dancing Russians and
space ships. We pity every poor bastard who claims to have topped
it.

Except Capcom, for two reasons: firstly, it claims to have topped
it in its own press material, which is a bit cheeky, and secondly,
it has come closer than virtually anybody in living memory.

So

The paradoxically titled Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, then. How
does it work?

It's rather like the bastard offspring of Tetris and Bust-a-Move.
You and an AI or human-controlled opponent have six block wide
boards with your little Street Fighter or Dark Stalkers characters
facing one another in the centre. Similar to Tetris, you're faced
with coloured gems tumbling from the sky on your side, this time in
pairs, and the idea is to arrange them adjacent to other gems of
the same colour with the usual Tetris-style controls. Horizontal
lines aren't important - it's all about getting the biggest
possible arrangements of same-colour gems lined up and then
shattering them. If you make a little square of four, they will
merge to become an almighty square "power gem". Throw on a couple
more and it's an even larger rectangular gem, and so on.

Every so often, you won't get a gem from the little gap at the top;
you'll get a coloured circle with a dot in the middle, or a little
spinning jewel. The circle is a "crash gem", which when placed next
to a gem of the same colour will - you've guessed it - shatter that
particular gem, and any adjacent gems of the same colour, and then
any adjacent to those, and those, and so on. And if you can snake a
little colour train round the board and then destroy it with a
crash gem, you will create big problems for your AI or human
opponent on the other side of the screen.

But before we get onto that, we should mention the little spinning
jewel, known as the rainbow gem. These are surprisingly rare and
destroy every gem corresponding to the colour of the one they land
on. Handy for clearing out a particularly packed board.

Hand-to-gem

However, unlike Tetris, Puzzle Fighter is about beating an
opponent. Whenever a crash gem has its effect, "counter gems" are
dumped on your opponent's board. Counter gems fall in a specific
coloured pattern for each character, which you can view on the
character select screen and in the manual, but sadly not in the
heat of the battle, and each is fronted by a number which counts
down from 5 to 0 - one count per gem pair - before solidifying. As
such, you can plan for the onslaught by lining up your existing
gems in a suitable colour array to receive and incorporate them to
your advantage. Failing that, you get a little warning before each
onslaught of counter gems, and smashing some of your own with a
crash gem (if possible) will lessen the subsequent "counter dump".
And while gems are counting down, any crash gem-related clearance
will destroy adjacent counters.

Another good ploy is chaining attacks. With a bit of preparation,
you can get a row of blues to blow up, which in turn drops a lot of
greens on top of a strategically placed crash gem, which in turn
dumps some reds on another crash gem, and so on and so forth. The
bigger the number of chains, the heavier the punishment in store
for your enemy - all the while your little Puzzle Fighter character
smacks his chum around in between the boards. Aw.

Phew. It's a lot more complicated to type it all out! In practise,
playing Puzzle Fighter is pretty easy. You make your gems as big
and as satisfyingly chunky as you dare, then shatter them to thwart
your opponent. The strategy of the game is in playing to your
opponent's counter gem pattern, and getting those crucial
explosions in prior to being severely countered. But as you'll
quickly learn, neither is all that easy to do, so it's often a case
of seat-of-the-pants puzzling while your opponent is working at the
same rate. As with Tetris, holding down on the D-pad is a shortcut
for sending the gems rattling down quickly, and like Tetris again,
fallen gems give you a split second to shift them left or right,
useful if you send them marginally astray when hurrying. And who
doesn't?

Porta podium

In terms of the GBA port, it's all as charming as we remember it on
the PSX and PC, with cute, simple, arcadey menus, a watch-and-learn
training mode (or video, effectively), the basic Arcade Mode (split
into three difficulty levels; breezy straight-through three stage
easy, 'normal to rock hard' eight stage medium and 'you will never
get off the first round' hard), an item and game mode-unlocking GBA
specific Puzzle Mode, and a couple of multi-player modes.

What? Yes, a couple. There's the usual link cable mode for two
players, sadly requiring two cartridges (note to GBA developers,
publishers, etc: stop doing this now, you greedy bastards),
but there's also an enigmatic Versus Mode, which lets you play
two-player on one GBA. Obviously this is a bit of a
non-starter on GlowGuard or Afterburner-less GBAs, but SP owners
will no doubt be delighted to have something to coo about. Well,
something else.

They'll be less excited about the controls though, as the two of
you huddle together, one hand per side of the GBA. Player one
controls his gems with left/right on the D-pad and the left
shoulder button (tap it to turn the gems anti-clockwise, hold to
send the gems quickly to ground) while player two uses B/A,
corresponding to left/right, and the right shoulder button.
Surprisingly, it works! You can just about get on with a game or
two this way, but we'd say it should probably be reserved for
couples and best friends - or those of you on Ken's buses.
Otherwise, it just makes us wonder why a one-cart link cable mode
wasn't included. Eh, Capcom?

As you can tell though, the port is largely very good. The menus
are all very obvious, the display is crisp and clear and the
graphics are functional - except for the cutesy, "super deformed"
(ugh) SF2 and Dark Stalkers folk making up the character roster,
who thrust and gyrate their beat 'em up wares in time to your
gem-crushage. They look splendid.

Puzzling

It's been a while since we've recommended a puzzler on the GBA, but
with Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo we're tempted to do just that.
Like most puzzle games, it's all in the gameplay, and Puzzle
Fighter's model is more imaginative and works a lot better than
most of the others we've seen lately. Like ZooCube, for example.
And unlike Tetris, there's scope to get much better at it by
learning the counter gem routes and finding your ideal character
match, and there's a single-player game that takes more than a
first-time brain to overcome. Much more. Throw in an adventurous
two-on-one-GBA multi-player mode, the obligatory (and fantastic)
link cable mode and cute, quirky visuals and Puzzle Fighter becomes
an essential purchase for puzzle fans. It's still not Tetris, but
that's no reason to ignore it.